Ex-Vegan (6+ Months): I Went Vegan to Fix My Health But Realized That Animal Foods are Key

Watch on YouTube · 2021-04-14 · 18 min

0:00 Hi everybody. I'm here with an ex-vegan today. I'm going to interview him. How long were you vegan and why did you get into it and how did it unfold? What happened?

[video] 0:14 Okay. Yeah. So to directly answer the question, I was vegan for about six months, but before that I was vegetarian for a couple of years.

[video] 0:27 not super strict vegetarian because honestly I was just doing it I thought it was healthy to eat mostly plant-based so when I was in when I was in high school actually I had an autoimmune issue that came about because a lot of stress that was going on in my family and it was pretty bad there was a point where I mean I couldn't even walk more than five minutes at a time and I was always really tense. My muscles always felt like I had been running a marathon, even though I hadn't done anything. I was just super exhausted all the time. I would sleep like 12 hours a day. And this is even while I was in high school, I would sleep just so much. So I was trying to find something that would help me feel better. And I think on Netflix, I found a couple documentaries of people who said that, you know, they'd gone vegan and It cured cancer and all that type of stuff.

[video] 1:27 So I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Because I'd always heard that eating vegetables and fruit and stuff was healthy.

[video] 1:37 And I guess another thing that contributed to that was that I grew up as a Mormon. And in their health code, they say that you eat meat sparingly, that wheat was made for the belly of man, that

[video] 1:54 You're trying to eat basically plant-based, honestly.

1:59 Would you say that if you have a religious mindset, from Mormonism or whatever, that it's easier to get into something like veganism, which is sort of like a religion, this mindset that you need to have? That's a good question.

[video] 2:12 I can say maybe. That's not the way it was for me exactly.

[video] 2:18 So I'll explain that a little bit. So I honestly, honestly thought with, with whatever religious mindset I had, I just thought that they were right about the way to eat. And so when I started seeing things that looked like scientifically that eating vegetables and not eating a lot of meat was the right thing to do, it was kind of the other way around. It was more like, it made me feel more that the religion I believed in was right because science was saying that basically being vegetarian almost was healthy. So it kind of did contribute to it, but in a backwards way. But yeah, interesting question. So, believe it or not, I was actually not a Mormon anymore by the time I went vegan. And that's kind of why I say it's not necessarily the same thing, because I was not religious and then I went vegan. Because my older brother, who is a vegan still,

[video] 3:13 had been vegan for probably four or five months before he was talking to me about it. And he was pulling up all these studies, peer-reviewed stuff from the journals, and he was saying, if you eat this specific thing, it does that specific thing for your body, and it'll make you healthier or whatever. And I believed him, because like I said before, everyone's always told me that already.

[video] 3:40 Yeah, so I went vegan because I thought it was the right thing to do for my health, because I had had the health issues in the past. And it wasn't really, for me, a moral thing so much.

[video] 3:54 But for my older brother, it definitely is a moral thing, which is interesting. So to kind of go back to the question again, he no longer being Mormon either, I think one of the things that he found in veganism was like a replacement for his structure of morals. So there is an essence of religiosity in being a vegan, especially the way he approaches it. He does it because it makes him feel like he's a good person. He also believes that it's healthy for him, but that's not his main drive. So in a way it's like he transferred his morals from being Mormon to being a vegan. Whereas that didn't apply to me, which is probably one of the reasons that I didn't stick with it for more than six months, because I was able to be honest with myself when my health kept declining.

[video] 4:52 It was pretty bad, pretty stressful on my body. I had a lot of breakouts and stuff. I don't know if you can see on the camera, but you can probably see I still have a lot of acne scars and stuff on my face. They've healed a lot, but I still have like I guess a lot of stuff from when I was vegan. But the main thing that bothered me when I ate as a vegan was just that I was always stressed. I was the opposite of always exhausted. It was like my adrenals were just constantly keeping me awake all the time. I wasn't eating enough, which is also a thing.

[video] 5:30 I thought I was eating enough, but looking back on it now, of course I wasn't.

5:35 Was it because the food wasn't appetizing or you just didn't want to be bloated maybe from the fiber or something like that?

[video] 5:42 I was pretty lucky not to be super bloated, but part of it was I didn't want to spend the effort to cook something that was only going to taste mediocre if it was good at all.

[video] 5:58 Most vegetation, all that stuff, I don't find it appetizing even still. But at the time, I just ate it because I thought it was healthy. What I mostly did was I took supplements, which of course had a lot of caffeine in them and all that stuff. So that's probably why I felt wired all the time. And I felt stressed about it almost because of that. But yeah, I probably had times where I had more supplement powders than I did food, which was not great. I got down to, well, in about a year, a year and a half maybe, I started at about 270 pounds.

[video] 6:34 which that's pretty heavy I got all the way down to 180 in about a year and a half just and I thought it was like oh great I'm getting healthy losing weight but honestly I just felt like garbage you were consuming yourself yeah yeah it wasn't great wasn't it similar for your brother also yeah he was pretty heavy too much heavier than I was I think he's he's still relatively heavy but Yeah, he lost quite a bit of weight in the first year. I think he's stagnated though because he eats more calories than I do. He eats like, what do you call that? That fake meat and all that stuff. He eats a lot of that pretty frequently. So I don't know, I guess, I don't know what the difference is for that, but maybe just over consumption in general has kind of kept his weight stagnant.

7:30 Did you ever ask him why he eats the fake meat? If he's craving meat?

[video] 7:35 He basically admitted it without me having to ask and he's like, I just like the taste. So yeah.

7:41 Okay. Yeah. Did you yourself go through any cravings like that?

[video] 7:50 When I was vegan? Yeah.

[video] 7:53 One of the problems I had is that I never liked steak and I never liked... I kind of liked chicken, really. It's pretty easy to... Because it's a little bit harder to overcook chicken, I guess. Because when I was growing up, my dad always bought steaks from, like, Walmart. And they were really thin, and he would overcook them. So it was just disgusting to me. So because that was my only experience, really, with that type of food, if I had any cravings at all, it was probably more for... Especially when I was vegan, it was probably more for cheese, eggs, and maybe chicken. Because I did work at Chick-fil-A for a while. I would have my employee meals there. So I had a lot of chicken. Yeah, good question. Yeah, I wonder how different that answer would be, though, if I had had good quality stuff beforehand.

[video] 8:52 Because I know a lot of people who have that, where they crave a lot of beef and all that stuff while they're vegan.

9:00 What do you eat nowadays, and how do you feel now?

[video] 9:03 Yeah, great question. So about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago, I actually found your channel and started eating immediately. I just ate a raw egg. And it was a crazy day because I remember the feeling very distinctly. I felt like garbage and I was really like tired and almost worried about my health again because I didn't want to go back to this stage where I couldn't walk very much because I had to walk for the job that I worked at. Cooking beef jerky in a factory, I have to be able to push all the trucks around and they're like hundreds and hundreds of pounds on wheels and I'm pushing it around. So I knew I had to protect my health and I accidentally found your channel, and one of the first things I did that seemed the least scary was a raw egg. Funny enough, because you'd think salmonella, but yeah, it just seemed like it would taste okay, I guess. So, I ate that raw egg, and my body just accepted it.

[video] 10:03 I don't know how else to explain it. Like, it just, it was like, it felt right, but also exciting. In a way, my eyes kind of got wide and I was like, Whoa, all right, I could do this. The next thing I did was I bought some beef, some ground beef from the store and I tried eating that, but it didn't taste very great because it wasn't very good quality. But then for the next six months or so, I basically ate rare meat, liver, brains, kidneys. I didn't like the kidneys, so I didn't have those very much. But a lot of cheese, a lot of fat. I would buy just straight up fat and just chop it up and eat it. And then right when the disease hit in 2020,

[video] 10:59 I was in between apartments in between jobs trying to find food sources and whatnot and The lifestyle change of the new job that I got to where I have to drive around a lot And I don't really I guess it's my fault. I didn't really carry much around with me started going back towards more like fast food So when I started doing that I started feeling obviously more tired. I gained some weight back. I went from 180 to like 210 in probably about the last year.

[video] 11:35 But I still felt better than when I was vegan because what I would do is, yeah, I'm buying fast food, but I'd buy the stuff that has like a lot of meat and whatever and then just take off the bread and eat it that way. So yeah, I mean, whatever.

11:51 Where do you think veganism comes from and what's the future?

[video] 11:57 That's actually a really rough question. You asked earlier about religion and all that. I think a lot of it, wherever religion comes from, it's probably the same source, man. Honestly. Whoever is in power, knows that taking away a natural human diet is going to be effective at making people basically mindless in a way or at least at least to the point where they'll follow whatever you tell them to believe and they'll believe it and they'll live the way you want them to maybe sort of off topic but but my brother who is vegan basically follows every everything that the mainstream media says He believes it. He like, he loves Bernie Sanders. He was okay with Biden, obviously coming into office.

[video] 12:53 Like, not that I'm going to say anything about that, but the fact that he just goes with whatever the mainstream is to me, that's interesting because his personality growing up was always to be so contrary, unless he had some type of reason. But now it just seems like whatever reason he's given is good enough. I mean, it's not really fair for me to judge, but...

13:15 I see what you're saying, yeah.

[video] 13:17 Yeah, yeah. So I guess it comes from wherever it is that most systems of control and religions and, you know, whatever it is, it comes from. So it's just whoever's in power. And what was the other part of your question, if you remember? Where it's heading. Where it's heading. I think we can see pretty clearly where it's heading based off the last couple of years. I mean, the changes have been so rapid. Pushing veganism, but also pushing socialist, communism, whatever you want to call it. Just more and more control, more and more censorship, as you've seen. Just limiting the freedom of the human species.

[video] 14:03 Limiting the freedom, the health, the longevity.

[video] 14:08 The mental health too, mental health is a big thing for me. I had a pretty rough childhood growing up, but I did everything that I could, whether it was finding a therapist or reading books or trying to do whatever, just to get better because I knew that the world out there, it's there for me to explore, it's there for me to be happy inside of it. It's a gift really, but it's a gift that I had these blinders over my eyes of this just poor mental health, poor physical health, where I wasn't able to get out and just be a real person, a real human.

[video] 14:46 And I think that that's where it's heading for most people. It's just poor health, an inability to look outside of the prisons that they've built themselves into, whether that's with a family that they don't actually care about, a boyfriend or a girlfriend where they have issues but they're not getting out of it. Like, you know, I mean, sometimes it happens. But the ability to at least see through that is being taken away. So some people never find their way out because they just assume that what they have is all there is. But there's so much to explore. So much of reality that I guess...

[video] 15:24 I guess in a weird way, people find reality irrelevant.

[video] 15:29 I mean, they'd much rather live in the stories that they've lived their whole life.

15:36 Speaking of stories, do you remember anything that you experienced during the time with vegetarianism, anything special? Anybody you met, any other vegans, vegetarians, any health issues maybe?

[video] 15:48 Yeah, good question. I wasn't very involved with anybody else who was vegetarian or anything like that. I was mostly involved at the time with people who were also Mormons. So whether they were vegetarian or not was up to them. So it wasn't really something I focused on, but I just thought that was normal to be healthy. So I mean, I guess I kind of got my mom into it for a while, but we never had any super bad health effects, mostly me. She seemed to do okay, because I think she didn't follow it as much as I did.

[video] 16:25 Yeah.

16:27 Anything else you would like to add? Anything you would like to say to any vegans watching?

[video] 16:33 Yeah. One big thing that is important to me and that has, I guess, contributed to my mental health and physical health is be open to the possibility that you're still wrong. Like, to say that you really actually totally know something is probably a dangerous thing to say because you could be completely wrong. And if you are wrong, what's that doing to you? There are options. You can try to do something else. I mean, if it's a moral thing, maybe the morals aren't right. Maybe it's not actually moral. There's probably some factor to consider. Like for me, I sort of did think that veganism was moral because my brother was always talking about that.

[video] 17:19 until the question in my mind was is it still moral if it's hurting human health and then my conclusion was that it was hurting human health and that it was no longer moral to be a vegan not that I mean maybe it's immoral but for me it just wasn't moral any longer so it wasn't an issue when I started eating meat but yeah that's what I would say whether that means anything or not but alright thanks Yeah, you're welcome.